Assessment of 3D printing technology for potential application towards manufacturing composite propellants

摘要

Ammonium perchlorate based solid composite propellants are conventionally manufactured by a casting process. The casting of propellants is highly resource intensive and demands a shaped mold for each grain shape to be casted. This limits the number of grain shapes that can be tested with various propellant compositions. As the grain shape directly affects the performance of a propellant charge, innovative grain geometries could provide significant boost in performance. 3D printing techniques are a subset of additive manufacturing or rapid prototyping and provide the capability of quick and economical manufacture. Thus, application of these techniques for composite propellant manufacture has the potential to allow the study of parametric variation of propellant shapes with ease. This article presents an exploratory study aimed at application of 3D printing techniques for manufacturing composite propellants.